Administration

Foreclosure News!

December 2011

Road Map to Housing Rebound (U.S.NEWS)

If you're a homeowner these days--and almost two thirds of Americans are--the housing market generally doesn't fall into the realm of pleasant dinner conversation.

The once-booming industry has been bruised and bloodied from nearly every angle: Home prices have plunged 30 percent nationally over the past five years, millions of Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure, and millions more are on the brink with underwater mortgages. Still others are seriously delinquent on their home loans.

Things are bad, maybe the worst they've ever been, but there's likely to be more pain before there are any real gains for the housing market, experts say, primarily because of the giant inventory of homes on the market and the certainty more will be coming through the pipeline over the next few years.

Still, the U.S. economy is resilient. The recovery has absorbed a debt-ceiling fiasco at home, a near financial meltdown in Europe, and political chaos in the Middle East. The job market is also improving, consumers are spending more, and corporate balance sheets remain healthy, all of which are critical for the housing market to rebound.

The remaining puzzle piece is time and how much of it the housing market will need to recover. Here are some other hurdles the housing market needs to overcome before a rebound takes root:
Job growth/broader economic gains. After a bumpy several months, the employment outlook has started to improve, with the private sector adding more than 200,000 jobs in November, according to payroll firm ADP. That's certainly good news, but we're not out of the woods yet. The national unemployment rate is still sky high at 9 percent and the pace of job growth needs to double before it translates into the broader economic growth needed to bolster a housing recovery.

"The situation in the housing market is tightly bound with what's happening in the broader economy," says Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow. "A broader economic recovery is going to have to precede a recovery in housing. Really, job growth is so essential for housing demand."

Particularly important is the unemployment rate among young Americans between 25 and 34 years old.

"These are the people that are forming households and buying their first homes," says Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia. Due to the bad economy, more young Americans have been "doubling up," moving in with friends or living at home to ride out lean times. That's put the kibosh on demand, according to some, which is part of the reason why there's still so much housing inventory to work through.

Clarity on foreclosure processes. A group of states has banded together to sue lenders and mortgage servicers over what they claim to be improper foreclosure practices. Awaiting rulings in those suits, lenders have held back on foreclosures, slowing the pace and increasing the backlog. The longer it takes to get clarity on how to proceed with foreclosures, the longer it will take to clear that inventory and the longer it will take for housing prices and the broader housing market to recover.